Major Updates to NoveList's Appeal Terms

Last week, NoveList has this blog post about major updates to their appeal vocabulary in the database. While I know that not everyone has access to the database through their library, it is important to know and understand the "why" behind these changes for everyone who helps readers.

NoveList has years of data about what readers are looking for and collects feedback from library workers about what terms work best, which are not helpful, and what they would want added. So please look at the changes they are making whether or not you use NoveList because it will give you a sense of what terms are most useful when helping readers and the reasons behind their choices at this moment.

Appeal terms get to the heart of WHY someone likes a book. They have nothing to do with WHAT happens in that book. Helping readers figure out their WHY and then matching books using their WHY as your guidepost is how we best help our readers.

For example let's take 2 completely different books: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin vs I Was a Teenaged Slasher (out today!) by Stephen Graham Jones. Here is what I said about the Jones book in my review of it here:

And here is a wildcard suggestion but one I think is a great way to introduce a wide range of readers to the brilliance of Jones as a writer-- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Zevin. All of your readers who loved that book despite the "video game" frame because of the amazing boy-girl friendship, this is the same. Despite the "slasher" frame if you loved the friendship in that one, read this SGJ novel now. As I said in my review of the Zevin when I first read it:

It is ultimately the story of a friendship. A brutally honest portrait of a complicated friendship from the age of 12 to adulthood between a boy and girl. There is NO sexual tension...

These readers-- of which there are many including a few I have told to read Zevin for this exact reason-- will love I Was a Teenaged Slasher.

This is a great example of how to use WHY someone would like the book and not WHAT happens to make connections for readers that they would never make on their own. I have matched MANY happy readers to the Zevin by telling them," While the frame is a behind the scenes look at the start of the video game industry, it is, at it's heart, the story of a life-long friendship." The same holds true for the SGJ. 

The point here is to understand appeal terms and why they are the better way to match books with readers over trying to match plot.

Please click here or see below for the announcement and explanation from NoveList and remember to always match readers with books based on WHY they enjoy a story, not WHAT happens. 

Major Updates to NoveList Appeals Vocabulary

Readers' tastes and vocabulary are evolving, and these changes will help you deliver outstanding suggestions

We have some big news for NoveList users: The appeal terms you know, and love have gotten a makeover. That’s right! We’ve cut our hair, changed our clothes, and switched out our glasses for contacts (cue some Patti LaBelle, please!). 

Our appeal vocabulary was developed almost 15 years ago to help library staff connect with readers and give them great reading suggestions. The terms we have created have evolved since then, keeping pace with the ebb and flow of reading trends. But with all this growth, we realized it was time to redefine how our terms relate to each other, and other story elements like subjects, genres, or themes.

For the past three years (!), we've been working hard to develop our appeal vocabulary into more cohesive, stream-lined categories to reach the following goals:

• Distillation: Focusing on what is most important about the essence of the reading experience.
• Information retrieval: Ensuring consistent vocabulary so you can get robust and relevant search results every time you look for a title.
• Discoverability: Making it easier for you to find more book records and connecting similar books for better visibility.

We used feedback from NoveList library users and data (and a lot of passionate debate!) and have arrived at the following updates. 

We’ve rearranged and renamed categories to make them more intuitive and meaningful.

• Mood replaces the term Tone.
• Style replaces the term Writing Style.
• Our Pace terms are now part of the Style category.
• Characterization replaces Character, detailing our character type terms (Flawed, Brooding, or Likeable, for example).

We’re combining similar terms.

• Accessible and Easy-to-understand mean the same things but were previously used for different audience levels. We’ve combined these two terms under the term Accessible.
• Sympathetic and Relatable are very closely related in concept so we’ve merged these terms into Sympathetic, which creates more meaningful matches.

We’re deleting problematic, unclear, and redundant terms.  

• Courageous 
• Quirky 
• Awkward    
• Compelling 
• Engaging
• Mystical 
• Jargon-filled

We’re renaming terms to increase clarity. 

• The term Dramatic is used to describe cinematic books that feature exciting and larger-than-life stories, and not for books that are intense dramas or have back-stabbing social scenes with spiteful personalities (those are High drama). Because of this confusion, we are renaming Dramatic to Cinematic. 

We are introducing new terms.

• Fun read: Think beach reads, escapist fiction, popcorn fodder. These books are lighter in tone and offer an effortless and enjoyable reading experience.
• Unputdownable: To help identify those books you just have to read in one sitting. These range in genre but tend to be heavier or more sinister in tone and/or topic. They might have higher stakes, and certainly more drama, and are the books that keep you up too late on a school night.
• Identities: Spotlights our 41 (and counting) character identity terms (Neurodivergent, Indigenous, or Muslim, for example).

We developed these terms to give readers access they have never had before. This reboot is a labor of love and we’re excited for you to explore and utilize our refreshed vocabulary to its fullest.